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Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

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Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#311

Post by bosswipe »

briandear wrote: post #283
anigbrowl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creditors can experience some of the pain that they normally inflict on others. They are not sacrosanct and are the least important parties in economic relations during an emergency. As normality is restored, they will have new opportunities during the ensuing large scale financial restructuring.

Bob’s Drywall Supply has net 60 for a delivery of drywall. Constructor Bill now can’t pay. Bob’s Drywall is a creditor and is on the hook for a product he already shipped. Now Bob’s Drywall Supply can’t pay the company that provided him with Net 90 terms. So Bob and Bill are now insolvent. And they fire their employees. Suggesting that creditors somehow deserve “pain,” is just cruel. Creditors don’t “inflict pain” on…

The problem is when everybody takes a hit except the "too big to fail" banks. That's what happened in the last financial crisis, the government bailed out only the big banks by buying their toxic loans at face value. When Obama tried to also bail out individual homeowners it sparked the Tea Party backlash and he pretty much backed off on those plans.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#312

Post by ryanSrich »

This feels like a much worse outcome than just taking the virus on the chin and letting 40-70% of the population get sick. That may seem contrarian, but this panic feels worse than the actual virus. More people will die from economic hardship than from COVID.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#313

Post by tathougies »

jader201 wrote: post #309
tathougies wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because of people panic selling, and it's a wonderful opportunity to buy cheap stocks.

The problem is stocks continue to fall — hard — and nobody knows where the floor is. It’s also unclear how long it will take everything to recover, if they do continue to fall.

Stock prices don't really matter in the short-term, and we are lucky that the underlying financials are good, and that -- at the end of the largest bull run in history -- many of the largest companies have lots of cold hard cash. Apples hundreds of billions don't look so silly now, do they?

Oh, BTW, the floor is hard-set at zero, which they'll never get to, since -- given there is no underlying financial issue, and that demand is going to be higher than ever once we're done with this -- all these companies have intrinsic value.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#314

Post by natalyarostova »

ryanSrich wrote: post #312

This feels like a much worse outcome than just taking the virus on the chin and letting 40-70% of the population get sick. That may seem contrarian, but this panic feels worse than the actual virus. More people will die from economic hardship than from COVID.

I guess people would rather lower the gdp than have their parents die.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#315

Post by ehnto »

amiga_500 wrote: post #117
eyegor wrote: post #42

This is going to be an economic catastrophe unless there's somehow a nationwide bailout to literally all brick and mortar businesses. I know of several local bar/restaurants that are considering shutting down for good, and a colleague near Melbourne told me of 4 that already have (I'm eastern US). Even if this all blows over in 3 months, we'll have a huge surge in homelessness and folks needing social assistance acro…

Suspend rent payments

Who pays the landlords, they aren't public utilities after all. Yet, a government stimulus to landowners instead of citizens would be a bit disingenuous in my opinion.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#316

Post by ncallaway »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #276
ncallaway wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No precedent for it, and a lot of Supreme Court precedent against it Could you cite some of that precedent? When I did my research around quarantines, the things I found said that precedent was very thin. What precedent there was typically was extremely deferential to government responses during emergencies and pandemic outbreaks. I didn't find any SCOTUS cases myself, so I would be very curious to read the SCOTUS…

The precedent you are looking for is about the legal principles that limit the extent to which the government can prevent free travel, not quarantine per se. Quarantine must conform to that precedent, being one of many examples where the government may restrict travel. The No Fly List is a modern example of a government policy that violates free travel and has consistently suffered under judicial scrutiny -- it is in…

> The precedent you are looking for is about the legal principles that limit the extent to which the government can prevent free travel, not quarantine per se. Quarantine must conform to that precedent

As you noted, the highest level of judicial scrutiny for constitutionally protected rights (like the freedom of speech) is strict scrutiny.

That doesn't mean the government is unable to restrict those rights, but it generally means that the Government's regulations must meet the following criteria:

1. is necessary to a "compelling state interest"; 2. that the law is "narrowly tailored" to achieving this compelling purpose; 3. and that the law uses the "least restrictive means" to achieve the purpose.

From all the descriptions of precedent around quarantine laws that I've seen, the judiciary was extremely deferential to Government decision making during a bona-fide epidemic.

Given that, I think a reasonable travel regulation to implement a regional quarantine would easily survive such scrutiny.

1. "compelling state interest" - maintaining the public health has long been held to be a compelling state interest. 2. "narrowly tailored" - if the regional quarantine was restricted to bona-fide epidemic outbreaks, and backed up by epidemiological experts, I think the courts will accept this. I think this is the criteria that the drafting will have to be most carefully tailored around. 3. "least restricted means" - I think the Governments have been demonstrating that they have been actively trying all the other less restrictive means, and they haven't been effective.

Based on this, I find it extremely unlikely that a court would rule against a regional lockdown quarantine.

In saying there was significant precedent against it, I was hoping you had something related to epidemiological outbreaks and public health quarantines. I find the argument that the courts have generally been skeptical of travel restriction to be quite unpersuasive. I don't think courts will view this as a "typical" travel restriction, and will give local / state / federal governments a lot of leeway in responding to this kind of an outbreak.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#317

Post by anigbrowl »

briandear wrote: post #283
anigbrowl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creditors can experience some of the pain that they normally inflict on others. They are not sacrosanct and are the least important parties in economic relations during an emergency. As normality is restored, they will have new opportunities during the ensuing large scale financial restructuring.

Bob’s Drywall Supply has net 60 for a delivery of drywall. Constructor Bill now can’t pay. Bob’s Drywall is a creditor and is on the hook for a product he already shipped. Now Bob’s Drywall Supply can’t pay the company that provided him with Net 90 terms. So Bob and Bill are now insolvent. And they fire their employees. Suggesting that creditors somehow deserve “pain,” is just cruel. Creditors don’t “inflict pain” on…

I thought it was obvious I was talking about financial institutions, which are just going to have to eat it for a while, although with interest rates now at 0% that will be more manageable. I can't address every aspect of the economy in a short comment.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#318

Post by ncallaway »

tathougies wrote: post #307
ddingus wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they have roughly 5 times the beds per 1000 people too.

No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

> No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

Do you have a link to statistics that support that? Is that on an absolute basis or on a per-capita basis?

On a per-capita basis, I see more hospital beds in Italy than in the US (3.18 to 2.77): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp...

What's your source for data on critical care beds? I'd love to take a look

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#319

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

listenallyall wrote: post #299
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re looking at this through a very weird lens. Low paid line cooks and kitchen staff are the ones who most need this, because they don’t have savings or a month of food stocked - where are they going to get their own food for the duration of the shutdown? It’s absolutely true that it’s still a transmission vector, but human society can’t function with zero transmission vectors.

Yes, they need to work, but they -- and front-of-house staff -- would be far better off with restaurants that are open and functioning. Perhaps not at 100%, but they could certainly allow half-capacity or "shift seating". I'm sorry but it's simply a very bad look, when it is mandated by the government. Nearly everyone else has the luxury of remaining isolated and avoiding exposure, except for this small segment of vu…

There may be a misunderstanding here. The shutdowns we're seeing in the US aren't full lockdowns - under current plans, most businesses will remain open and most people will continue to go to work. I'd agree with what you're saying if there were a full lockdown happening that arbitrarily excluded to-go restaurants, but we're just doing targeted shutdowns of the biggest transmission vectors.

Re: Washington governor announces shutdown of restaurants, bars

#320

Post by tathougies »

ncallaway wrote: post #318
tathougies wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

> No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world. Do you have a link to statistics that support that? Is that on an absolute basis or on a per-capita basis? On a per-capita basis, I see more hospital beds in Italy than in the US (3.18 to 2.77): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp... What's your source for dat…

Oh sorry. Meant to post the article, from Forbes. US and germany are way ahead of the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...

Hospital beds are a different story, but not what is important for COVID, which needs ICU beds. Hospital beds are much easier to deploy anywhere (and with the emergency measures taken federally, will see a huge increase due to waived FDA requirements for inspection). An ICU is much more involved, and requires ventilators, specialty beds, special equipment, etc. Much more difficult to deploy suddenly in response to sudden upticks.

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